May 01, 2017

Hello readers,
Today I have my first foray into the world of loose multichrome flakies to share with you. All of the ones I've seen, including these, have been advertised for use with gel top coats. However, I figured I have sticky base coat, flakies stick to sticky things, let's try and make this work!

I tried out the Born Pretty Store Chameleon Flakies in shade 2345 which shift from green to indigo to purple. They come loose in a little jar and are super thin and light. Don't open this jar where there's any sort of breeze because they will go everywhere. I decided to try them as an accent over a regular polish so I started with a base of Femme Fatale Rockpool Whorl with Sephora's Shine XCEL top coat. Now for the sticking on of the flakies. I applied a thin coat of CND Super Sticky base coat over my existing (completely dry) mani. Then I waited about 20 seconds - long enough that the base wasn't smudge-able anymore, but short enough that it still has some tackiness to it. I dipped a silicone brush in the flakes and then patted them up the center of my nail onto the tacky base until they were nice and smooth. Repeat that for every finger. Don't try doing base coat on your entire hand and then doing flakes since the window in which the flakes will stick nicely isn't that long. These photos were taken a day after application and the flakes are definitely still there without any top coat sealing them in. Success? I think so! Photos were taken in daylight spectrum lighting.

... and a couple of extra pictures to really show of the shift to indigo and purple.

I only had to dab the flakes on lightly to get the speckled coverage in this look. I could have definitely achieved close to, if not full coverage if I had applied more of them over the sticky base. After this successful experiment I'm pretty sure I need all the colours. You can find Born Pretty Store on